Last Thursday, four top strategists of the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaigns were lured to Cambridge to enlighten us about lessons we should take away from their experience.

But a mysterious and perfectly timed power outage forced the host, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, to cancel the event, which was to include Team Obama's David Axelrod and Jim Messina, and the Romney posse's Eric Fehrnstrom and Stuart Stevens.

I take the blackout as a sign that the universe wants these smart and savvy yet secluded and out-of-touch campaign elites to hold their tongues — and learn some lessons from what ordinary people have been trying, collectively, to tell them: that voters know more about the country's mood than the campaign strategists do.

In the run-up to the November elections, the campaigns lunged at every bit of data the instant it appeared, in vain attempts to convince the voting public that the economy was either great or horrible.

None of it mattered — not to voters, anyway.

Surveys showed, and voting confirmed, that people were feeling the recovery gathering steam as the 2012 election approached. And we now learn, through new revised data, that the economy was in fact doing much better than these experts believed.

Similarly, ex-post-facto data confirmed that the economy tanked far worse than experts believed prior to the 2008 election; and people knew, long before pols and pollsters — and the above-named panelists — caught on, that Obama's 2010 "summer of recovery" was a sham.

Nonsense multiplied is just annoying nonsense.

The billions of dollars spent by the campaigns — and their loosely connected allies — went overwhelmingly into bigger and bigger placements of television ads in limited media markets. More than one million TV ads had aired by late October, according to Wesleyan University's Media Project, the vast majority in 15 markets, targeting nine swing states. Average residents of those states were seeing some individual ads 20 times a week.

Most of them were attacks, often unfair ones. And they did very little good — just look at the Romney efforts. Team Romney's attempts to convince Ohio voters that Obama tried to kill the auto industry only seemed to backfire. And attempts to sell Romney to Hispanic voters in Florida, Colorado, and elsewhere, with radio ads not touting actual policies but instead demonstrating that one of his sons speaks Spanish, resulted in an even worse election-day drubbing than expected.

In fact, much of the Romney campaign seemed to be about writing off unsupportive people, as seen in his secretly recorded "47 percent" speech, and in GOP Voter-ID laws. All of which simply galvanized those targeted poor and minority voters to go to the polls in unexpectedly high numbers.

One of the few things that actually did seem to have some effect was the enormous Obama operation that organized massive numbers of volunteers to go out knocking on doors, asking their neighbors to vote for the president's re-election.

But come Election Day, the only mandate people gave is to stop being jackasses.

Americans are united in their disapproval of the past two years of their elected officials pointing fingers while Rome burns. But voters didn't choose to end that — instead, they returned the very same divided government. And polls suggest that's exactly the result they wanted.

Little things In the midst of the new Republican majority's mania to reduce the size and cost of state government, I offer some advice and a warning.

Seeing things Early last week, US Senator Scott Brown claimed to have seen pictures of the dead Osama bin Laden, which he implied were shown to him in briefings. Hours later, his office put out word that the photos Brown had seen were not "authentic."

Rating the campaigns When reporters are trying to get info on candidates to share with voters, campaign staff hold the keys to the kingdom.

Thrill and Agony The vote totals that poured in through the state secretary's office November 6 provided one set of winners (Elizabeth Warren, John Tierney, Joe Kennedy III, medical marijuana) and losers (Scott Brown, Richard Tisei, medical suicide). But there were plenty of other victories and defeats in Bay State politics last Tuesday.

Budging Forward The nation has just suffered through fiscal-cliff negotiations that left nobody, on either side of the aisle, happy with the results or the process.

Smoke signals The Massachusetts Medical Society's strident opposition to medical marijuana helped prevent passage in the legislature, but could not defeat the ballot initiative.

A Statesman Too Late? The congressional debt "super committee" has begun its work, and already there are signs that its task is hopeless.

MRS. WARREN GOES TO WASHINGTON | March 21, 2013 Elizabeth Warren was the only senator on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, aside from the chair and ranking minority, to show up at last Thursday's hearing on indexing the minimum wage to inflation.

MARCH MADNESS | March 12, 2013 It's no surprise that the coming weekend's Saint Patrick's Day celebrations have become politically charged, given the extraordinary convergence of electoral events visiting South Boston.

LABOR'S LOVE LOST | March 08, 2013 Steve Lynch is winning back much of the union support that left him in 2009.

AFTER MARKEY, GET SET, GO | February 20, 2013 It's a matter of political decorum: when an officeholder is running for higher office, you wait until the election has been won before publicly coveting the resulting vacancy.